Epic column

What do these movies have in common: Superhero Movie, Scary Movie 4, Meet the Spartans, The Bodyguard, and Epic Movie?

Let me tell you real quick: every single one of them was a greedy studio's attempt at capitalizing on our youth's short attention span and unknowingness of what humor is.

Sure, you can tell me that what is funny is in the eye of the beholder. Yet none of you have sat through the horror that is Date Movie, a movie so asinine that I would rather watch Sudden Death with French subtitles.

Yes, Jean Claude Van Damme beating up the Pittsburgh Penguins mascot in a foreign language made me laugh harder than any part of Date Movie.

What's worse is that these films come out nearly every six months and make a decent sum at the box office despite being terrible. All the while they stomp on the legacy of such great movies of our past.

One of the biggest problems with Superhero Movie is the fact that there were already two superhero spoof movies released in the past couple years; anyone remember Hulk or Ghost Rider?

Some people might recognize Leslie Nielson as the father figure in Superhero Movie. But what about his classic role as Sergeant Frank Derbin alongside O.J. Simpson in The Naked Gun trilogy? Nielson has been cast in a few of the recent spoof movie releases, but all that is doing is ruining what was once a great comedy career.

The Naked Gun trilogy and Airplane! set the tone for what a spoof movie should be all about. Now many years removed, we are forced to see some Spartans having a dance-off.

If the people writing the movie actually saw Stomp the Yard and You Got Served, they would have realized that no film would be able to top the humor of dance crews training so hard that the only practice space that could handle them would be an empty swimming pool and a rain soaked boxing ring.

My utter distaste for How She Move and Step Up 2 The Streets will be left for another day, but the fact remains that these dance movies bring more humor to audiences than any spoof movie released in the last five years.

Let's discuss some of my least-liked spoof films.

First: Epic Movie.

It's a movie so big, they had to include 'epic' in the title. Featuring a spoof of the classic Snakes on a Plane and starring a Samuel L. Jackson-like character, there's no need to wonder why they used the word in the title.

I think the film would have been way better if it was just two hours of the Crossfire commercial over and over again. Overall it'd still be better than the remake of Rollerball.

Second: Scary Movie 2-4.

I never, ever want to see the Wayans Bros. make another film in my lifetime unless it's the sequel to Double-Take. But it would still have to star Eddie Griffin and that other guy, so technically, it'd be Quadruple-Take.

Third: The Bodyguard.

This film was just a big spoof on Kevin Costner's acting career. He should stick to doing what he does best, playing baseball and living in worlds surrounded by water, all the while trying to keep his job as a post-colonial postman.

Don't you see what these movies are doing? They are ruining the careers of those who once lived to make the comedic spoof.

Look at Steve Guttenburg. Since the release of all these spoof movies, he was cut from Dancing with the Stars, which means he's back trying to finally finish the long awaited sequel to The Big Green. This is the same man who starred in Short Circuit and Three Men and a Baby. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

How about Charlie Sheen? He starred in two classics, Hot Shots, and Major League. Both were amazing films, so good that they can be found on any Turner Broadcasting network at least twice a week. But his career has since been stagnated because he now has a sitcom on CBS. Nobody cares about sitcoms on CBS. Nobody cares about how some guy met my mother.

See, my point is this: the film industry is trying their best to dumb down American film audiences to the level of a Cro-Magnon (or Steven Seagal, current star of the straight-to-DVD feature Pistol Whipped) by making spoof films that feature nothing original, nothing remotely witty, and absolutely nothing rewarding.

But there is hope. Judd Apatow (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up), a man who in my eyes can barely do anything wrong as long as it is not The Cable Guy, is making stupid humor movies. And he is not insulting our intelligence. He's continually creating great storylines to go along with every obscene joke coming out of that overweight piece of garbage Jonah Hill's mouth (Note: I hate Jonah Hill. Can someone please tell him to stop yelling all the time? It's not funny anymore).

It's writers and filmmakers like Apatow that make me believe there is some hope for spoof movies. Maybe one day, when our kids are growing up, we can explain to them the beauty in the classic spoof movie, like Hot Shots: Part Deux, Naked Gun, or even Face-Off.